Time Is Running Out For Beatriz

If  you haven't signed the petition yet, please do so today.

From the petition:

Beatriz wants to live. She's 22 years old and the mother of an infant, but the 18 week pregnancy she's carrying is killing her -- right now as you read this -- and the government of El Salvador has refused to permit an exception to their abortion ban to save her life.
The fetus Beatriz is carrying is anencephalic; it has no brain and won't survive birth even if her health allowed her to carry to full term. More to the point, Beatriz has lupus, worsened by a kidney malfunction, and it's very dangerous for her to be pregnant. But under El Salvador's abortion ban, both Beatriz and any medical staff involved in providing a therapeutic abortion would face criminal charges, carrying penalties as high as 50 years in jail for her and 12 years in jail for her doctors.
Both El Salvador's Minister of Health and Attorney General for Human Rights support allowing an exception to save Beatriz' life, yet the Supreme Court has delayed making this literally life and death decision. Now this impoverished young mother has entered early stage renal failure as her pregnancy steadily destroys her kidneys.
Sign now to stand with Beatriz' husband and infant son today in asking the Salvadoran government to allow her doctors to save her life and their future together as a family.

Read More

Why Are Women So Mean?

So asks a Yahoo.com (Shine?)  article in its title:

Female Blogger Weight-Shames Cheerleader—Why Are Women So Mean?

The article goes on to describe various cases in which a female writer or commentator has been mean to other women, usually about their weight.  It then asks:

Where's the sisterhood?

Mmm.  Here we are, stuck on this crummy planet, a species that is pretty good at warfare and not at all bad with ordinary murdering.  Most of that is not  done by the mean women.  But you don't often see articles asking why men are so mean to other men.

The point is not to initiate another round of gender wars, my dears.  The point is that humans can be both really nasty and also quite wonderful.  Sometimes it's the same human being alternating between nastiness and niceness.

What makes that title weird is the singling out of women as the nasty ones.  The likely reason is in the traditional expectation that women should be nice, sweet and gentle.  When you add to that the feminist meme of sisterhood, articles of the kind I linked to are all about "gotcha!"  Even if what you write about is pretty small potatoes compared to what's happening in Syria, say.

The linked article isn't worth a lot of analysis, but notice that the thesis (about women being mean)  consists of digging up articles which support that view while ignoring all the articles where women do act in "sisterhood" or where female writers defend other women.

Then there is the subtler hint that the body-shaming done by the quoted writers tells us something important, gives us some new information.  Perhaps the idea is that it is other women who are the nastiest on their co-women (no such word, I know)?

But anyone who has read enough about celebrities in the media knows the pleasure people get from criticizing famous people, and many of those enjoying the stories are women.  That the criticisms are about the looks or weight of the female celebrities (or praise about their baby bumps) is because those are still the traditional fields for women to compete in. 

I'd like to turn this thing upside down and point out that it's astonishing how much cooperation exists between human beings, both between women and between men and across the gender aisle.  Humans are both competitive and cooperative, and women are not excused from that categorization. 

We are just a whole lot less comfortable with the idea of female nastiness than with the idea of male nastiness.

------
I decided to keep this post on the topic of women's humongous nastiness.  It could have equally been on the topic of body-shaming.  Or on the more nebulous connections between the goal of gender equality and the need for women to be in some ways "better" humans to deserve equality.  Or, of course, on the futility about writing on articles which are constructed to be sensational to maximize clicks.

Read More

Teaching Good Work Habits?

This story is almost a week old.  But I'm always either too early or too late, so what the heck:

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, so should we make little Johnny work for his free meal at school? Even if he misses class?

West Virginia state Del. Ray Canterbury (R-Greenbrier) (Bob Bird/AP)
“I think it would be a good idea if perhaps we had the kids work for their lunches: trash to be taken out, hallways to be swept, lawns to be mowed, make them earn it,” said Ray Canterbury, a Republican from Greenbrier and a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, during debate over Senate Bill 663, also known as the Feed to Achieve Act. 

The bill — the first of its kind in the nation — would create a partnership between private donations and public funds to make breakfast and lunch available for free to every student, kindergarten through high school senior, in West Virginia. It’s based on a model program in Mason County that’s improved attendance and decreased discipline problems, according to the school district’s food service director. 

Free meals are provided through the National School Lunch Program to students whose family’s income is 130 percent or less of the federal poverty guidelines. For this past school year, that means a family of four with an annual income of $29,965 qualifies. Children with household incomes of 185 percent or less of the poverty guidelines can get reduced-price meals under the program, which — I was surprised to learn — was established in 1946 by the National School Lunch Act. 

West Virginia’s Feed to Achieve Act wants to go beyond that by making sure no child goes hungry at school, but Canterbury repeated the theme of “there is no such thing as a free lunch” during the delegates’ discussion of the bill, which had passed the state Senate unanimously.

Canterbury clarifies his intentions:

Canterbury added that he thinks free lunches will undermine children's work ethics, saying the bill is "teaching students they don't have to work hard."

Here's the thing:  I think the idea of children being required to help some at schools is a good one.  But hardly any child works for his or her lunch in this country, including those who have wealthy parents.  So why single out only the children who have poor parents?  Good, age-appropriate work habits are something schools should teach all children.

If that teaching is given to only some children the system breeds stigma.  It also fails the wealthier children!

Read More

The UConn New Husky Logo Meme

Content Note:  Strong Rape Imagery At The End of This Post


There's a  good reason to ignore Rush Limbaugh and his misogynistic mutterings, and I mostly succeed in doing so.  But this particular story, about the new Husky Dog logo for the Huskies, the University of Connecticut sports teams, is worth covering, because it shows nicely how anti-feminist memes are sired and reared.

The backstory, as journalists say:  A University of Connecticut senior, Carolyn Luby, wrote an open letter to the university president, Susan Herbst, about the sports teams and the mascot.   The letter lists problems with the university athletes, including arrests of individual athletes and problems with the academic achievement of the men's basketball team.  It then states:

Instead of giving these problematic aspects of male athletic peer culture at UConn a second look or a giving the real face of athletics a true makeover, it appears that the focus of your administration is prioritizing the remodeling of the fictional face of the Husky Logo. Instead of communicating a zero tolerance atmosphere for this kind of behavior, increasing or vocalizing support to violence against women prevention efforts on campus in the face of such events, or increasing support to student run programs that seek to work with athletes on issues of violence as well as academic issues, it would appear that your administration is more interested in fostering consumerism and corporatization than education and community. Another example of this shift in priorities can be seen in the current administrations selection of the new logo — a selection made with no involvement from or consultation with the normal, everyday, non-Olympian student body:
Contrary to speculation, the Husky will not appear to be mean, snarling, or capable of frightening small children! Instead he will be rendered as the sleek, beautiful animal a real Husky truly is.
Well President Herbst, the new Husky logo may not be capable of frightening small children, but the face of real life UConn athletics is certainly capable of frightening college women.
It is looking right through you and saying, ‘Do not mess with me.’ This is a streamlined, fighting dog, and I cannot wait for it to be on our uniforms and court.~Geno Auriemma stated about the new logo change.

I  wouldn't have written that letter (at least in that way), but then I'm no longer a college senior and I know how the Internet works in cases like this.

And how does the Internet work in these cases?  It picks the new Husky logo out of the rest of the story and then states that these crazy feminists (or at least one, and soon many more) are now accusing cartoon characters of causing rape!

The Barstool Sports site (known for soft-porn pictures of women) posts the letter and this evaluation:

I don’t know about you but after looking at that new Husky logo literally all I can think about is sexually assaulting somebody.  Just RAPE on repeat in the back of my brain.  It’s just so strong…and powerful…I was never a scumbag piece of shit before but the hypnotizing eyes of that cartoon wolf dog is really swaying me big time. 

Don't read the comments to that story, unless you wish to learn about Internet misogyny.  But if you do wish to do that, you might find it interesting that I've seen worse comments on that site in the past.

So where are we?  The debate has now been refined as about the new Husky dog logo, not about the rest of Luby's letter.  And then our Rush joins in:

RUSH: There is a new logo for the Huskies.  University of Connecticut sports teams.  The new logo promotes rape, says one student.
"The new logo for the University of Connecticut’s sports teams is a terrifying husky dog that calls to mind images of sexual assault, says one student."  This is on the Daily Caller website.  "The new logo was unveiled last week, receiving mixed-to-negative reviews from UConn fans who preferred the older, cuter husky dog.  But one student went much further, criticizing the new, meaner logo for being a pro-rape symbol. In an open letter to UC President Susan Herbst, self-described feminist student Carolyn Luby wrote that the redesigned team logo will intimidate women and empower rape culture."
One student, University of Connecticut, upset with the new husky logo.  "UConn basketball coach Geno Auriemma said the logo 'is looking right through you and saying, "Do not mess with me." This is a streamlined, fighting dog, and I cannot wait for it to be on our uniforms and court.'  In response, Luby wrote, 'What terrifies me about the admiration of such traits is that I know what it feels like to have a real-life Husky look straight through you and to feel powerless, and to wonder if even the administration cannot "mess with them." And I know I am not alone.'"
Folks, we're talking about a cartoon character.  We're talking about a drawing.  We're talking about a logo, an icon, that will appear on basketball uniforms, maybe on the football helmet.  The self-described feminist student Carolyn Luby said there were two sexual assaults at UConn involving athletes in the past year.  The logo and the teams it represents are menacing to women. "The face of real-life UConn athletics is certainly capable of frightening college women."

Limbaugh believes that this is the start of something bigger.  Probably a feminist attempt to kill college football and to take political correctness to laughable extremes?  Something of that sort, because he then spends quite a bit time showing us that frightening rape logo.  Here's the picture from his site:

If you're watching, I want to show you this cartoon of the new mascot, the redesigned logo of the husky at UConn that promotes rape, and you see what you think.

 See how it all works?  That's just a cuddly face of a Husky, but we can't have it, because one student thinks it promotes rape:

CALLER:  Do we know for sure that this is a male Husky?
RUSH:  We don't.  But the female student does. That is the point.  One female student saw the new logo.  It's a drawing.  It is a cartoon figure, "Oh, my God, I feel like I'm gonna be raped."  And it made the news.  If it weren't in the Daily Caller, I wouldn't be talking about it.  The whole country knows about it now.  This is way beyond The Daily Caller, so now it's out there.  The new UConn icon, the new UConn logo, promotes rape.  What do you think they're gonna do at UConn?  They'll change it.  You know damn well they will.

But if you read Luby's letter carefully,  her point is that focusing on a new logo for the sports teams is misplaced when there are serious problems, both criminal and academic, that should have been attended to first.  And what she finds frightening is "the face of real-life UConn athletics."  The other references in her piece appear to be direct quotes from other people.

Soraya Chemaly writes about wolf images, available on the Internet, which aren't that removed from the new Husky logo.  I have no idea if Carolyn Luby had seen any of those images or how commonly viewed they are, but after reading Soraya's piece I spent a little time looking for such pro-rape images (probably intended as "jokes"), and these do look a fair bit like the new UConn logo (shown first for comparison):

I stress (in a very booming voice) that I AM NOT making an argument about the new Husky logo being in any way related to those courage-wolf pictures, and I'm QUITE SURE that its creators had no idea such images exist.  I also have NO IDEA how many people are aware of the insanity-wolf pictures or the courage-wolf pictures or if Carolyn Luby had ever seen them, for instance.

The point I'm trying to make is rather different:  When people's life experiences vary, the meaning of various images can also vary.  A swastika, for example, had a completely different meaning before the Nazis adopted it, and it still has a different meaning in some cultures.  A cartoon-character logo for a sports team COULD mean different things for different groups of people.  To insist that it should be interpreted the way Rush Limbaugh's peer group interprets it is no more logical than to insist that it should have other interpretations.

But that is not what the original open letter was about, really.

Read More

Wikipedia and Women Novelists

Amanda Filipacchi's NYT article on the treatment of women novelists in Wikipedia's spring cleaning is worth reading.  A taste:

I JUST noticed something strange on Wikipedia. It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the “American Novelists” category to the “American Women Novelists” subcategory. So far, female authors whose last names begin with A or B have been most affected, although many others have, too.
The intention appears to be to create a list of “American Novelists” on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men. The category lists 3,837 authors, and the first few hundred of them are mainly men. The explanation at the top of the page is that the list of “American Novelists” is too long, and therefore the novelists have to be put in subcategories whenever possible.
Too bad there isn’t a subcategory for “American Men Novelists.”

I just checked the page for "American Novelists" at Wikipedia, and the women novelists appear to have been put back in those categories of last names beginning with letters A and B.  Perhaps this happened because of Filipacchi's op-ed piece?   And there now is a tentative category called "American Men Novelists" though it has very few names.

Those two changes are probably good, though it looks as if Wikipedia cannot make up its mind about whether women novelists belong in the overall group of novelists or whether men novelists should be removed from that group, too.  If they remove both women and men from "American novelists", that category will be somewhat empty.

Duh.  In any case, Filipacchi's piece was about that general cultural rule which makes women into a sub-category while men, in most applications, are viewed as just individuals who belong to the main category. 

I've written about that before.  This particular example shows how that treatment can also create a ranking of the type the lower picture in my earlier post happens to demonstrate:

------
Deanna Zandt has more on Wikipedia and gender stuff. 

As a complete aside, the Finnish Wikipedia version of family and intimate partner violence is created by an MRA activist and includes stuff about the general characteristics of women in prison and all sorts of completely unrelated material as well as very biased sources.

There are warnings about the need for a complete re-writing (with less biased sources, I hope), but nobody seems to have done anything about that re-writing.  One can debate the reasons but a cursory peek behind the curtain suggests to me that anyone who takes that task will face a lot of aggro from the MRAs.

Read More

Today's Action Alert: Save Beatriz' Life

Via Rheality Check:

Beatriz wants to live. She's 22 years old and the mother of an infant, but the 18 week pregnancy she's carrying is killing her -- right now as you read this -- and the government of El Salvador has refused to permit an exception to their abortion ban to save her life.
The fetus Beatriz is carrying is anencephalic; it has no brain and won't survive birth even if her health allowed her to carry to full term. More to the point, Beatriz has lupus, worsened by a kidney malfunction, and it's very dangerous for her to be pregnant. But under El Salvador's abortion ban, both Beatriz and any medical staff involved in providing a therapeutic abortion would face criminal charges, carrying penalties as high as 50 years in jail for her and 12 years in jail for her doctors.
Both El Salvador's Minister of Health and Attorney General for Human Rights support allowing an exception to save Beatriz' life, yet the Supreme Court has delayed making this literally life and death decision. Now this impoverished young mother has entered early stage renal failure as her pregnancy steadily destroys her kidneys.
Sign now to stand with Beatriz' husband and infant son today in asking the Salvadoran government to allow her doctors to save her life and their future together as a family.

El Salvador bans abortion in all cases.  You can join a petition to save Beatriz here.

Read More

But That's Different! On the Horror of Air Traffic Delays And Related Matters.

I've followed with some dark mirth the recent complaints about the flight delays caused by the sequestration law in the US.  From Huffington Post:

Lawmakers passed a bill Friday to ease air traffic delays before catching their own flights home for a week off, leaving unchanged other painful effects of the across-the-board spending cuts mandated by Congress' sequestration law.
While the legislators likely improved their chances for on-time flights when they return to work next month, cuts that are harming care for cancer patients, closing children out of preschool and ending food programs for the elderly remain in place.

The $85 billion in mandatory cuts this year are a result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which Congress passed after its standoff over raising the nation's debt limit. The sequester was proposed as a fallback in case Congress could not come up with a more rational way to achieve at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over a decade -- the theory being that sequestration would be so painful that Congress wouldn't let it happen.
But Congress and the "super committee" tasked with the budget-cutting job failed anyway.

Why would flight delays be something to fix while the cuts to cancer patients are not, hmh?

I think we meet two old friends here.  Let me introduce you to this tall guy with safety pins through his cheeks and ears.  He's called Lack Of Empathy,  and he often sits at the Congressional Bar and works out at the gym there.  He finds the poor undeserving because he is not poor and he is deserving!  He is proud of his logical thinking and his good work ethic, but he seldom dwells on the trust fund he grew up with.  It's possible that he used to pull wings off flies as a little boy to study what they would do without wings.

And here's Lack of Imagination!  She looks almost exactly like a human-sized Barbie doll, and cannot possibly imagine why any woman wouldn't.  All you need is some silicone, a diet of lettuce leaves and discipline!  She doesn't know anybody who is poor or really sick.  When she tries to think about how poverty might feel she comes up against an inner wall.  If she hasn't experienced something it doesn't exist, and so far she has experienced very little, having been cushioned by money and lots of family help and good connections.  Because her family helped her, that help is now invisible, just the way all families obviously automatically work.

Both of these critters find political decision-making very easy, and neither has any trouble with ethical or moral judgments about other people. 

You may have met them.  Their genders can be reversed, because Lack of Empathy and Lack of Imagination can be both male and female names, and often one individual carries both names.

When one of these types of politicians disapproves of gays and lesbians but then  learns that his (or her) son is gay, suddenly being gay is no longer an abomination but simply one form of sexuality.  Suddenly that politician no longer opposes same-sex marriage, suddenly that politician opposes discrimination against gays and lesbians.  Because it is different.

A pro-life politician with either or both of these names may regard abortion as murder when other people choose it but  a necessity when it is chosen by a family member of that politician or the politician herself.   Because it is different.

And although such politicians might deem the evil consequences of the sequestration law as lamentable, intellectually speaking, the emotional message only hits home when it...hits home.  When the plane they must take is delayed, for example, and they cannot get home.

That was a political fairly tale (better leave the typo in).  An alternative interpretation of all this is to point out the bubble our politicians live in, a bubble made out of money and sycophants and comfortable protection from such hunting monsters out there as Unemployment and No Access to Health Care.  Even politicians with empathy and imaginative abilities might get used to living in that bubble, might forget the other realities and might then complain about those few consequences of the sequestration act which hurt even them.





 

 

Read More

Today's Action Alerts

First, the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education in the US is considering dropping the requirement that family doctors know how to prescribe contraceptives.  That would not be a good thing. 

Today is the last day you can comment on the idea.  The link.

Second, the Koch brothers (sorta like Sauron in the Lord of the Rings or at least extreme conservative money boys) are considering buying the Tribune Company, the owner of such newspapers as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.  If that idea makes you a bit concerned, you can express our views here.

I haven't carefully scrutinized the actual danger in those initiatives but the time spent opposing them (if you are in the US) is very little. 

But just imagine a world where our news come from two or three of the richest guys on the planet!

Read More

The Bitch From Hell?

Now that's a controversial title for a blog post!  A piece by Dylan Byers about the reign of Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the  New York Times, subtly hints at the possibility of Abramson's bitchiness.

Some snippets from Byers' article:

One Monday morning in April, Jill Abramson called Dean Baquet into her office to complain. The executive editor of The New York Times was upset about the paper’s recent news coverage — she felt it wasn’t “buzzy” enough, a source there said — and placed blame on Baquet, her managing editor. A debate ensued, which gave way to an argument.
Minutes later, Baquet burst out of Abramson’s office, slammed his hand against a wall and stormed out of the newsroom. He would be gone for the rest of the day, absent from the editors’ daily 4 p.m. meeting, at which he is a fixture

...

In recent months, Abramson has become a source of widespread frustration and anxiety within the Times newsroom. More than a dozen current and former members of the editorial staff, all of whom spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity, described her as stubborn and condescending, saying they found her difficult to work with. If Baquet had burst out of the office in a huff, many said, it was likely because Abramson had been unreasonable.
“Every editor has a story about how she’s blown up in a meeting,” one reporter said. “Jill can be impossible,” said another staffer.
Just a year and a half into her tenure as executive editor, Abramson is already on the verge of losing the support of the newsroom. Staffers commend her skills and her experience but question whether she has the temperament to lead the paper. At times, they say, her attitude toward editors and reporters leaves everyone feeling demoralized; on other occasions, she can seem disengaged or uncaring.

...

If Abramson is disengaged, Baquet is just the opposite: He cares about newsroom morale and he cares about being liked, staffers say. That’s not to say he doesn’t have his own issues. As Washington bureau chief, he got so upset when a story didn’t make the front page that he drove his fist through the wall. (“I never lose my temper at a person,” he said. “I lose my temper at walls.”) But even this anecdote is recalled fondly.

Bolds are mine.

Note the different characterization of Abramson and Baquet.  I'm wondering how that characterization would have sounded if Baquet had been a woman who stormed out of the room bashing walls and Abramson her male boss.  It's not difficult to assume that the female Baquet could have been seen as overly emotional, unable to control her feelings, going as far as punching the walls, and that the male Abramson would have been seen as a decisive and cool boss type.  Ann Friedman thinks so.

I don't know these people which means that I have no way of judging whether Abramson's gender affects the way she is judged in Byers' article.  Perhaps not.  On the other hand, if we have different patterns for men and women in the world of work, as we seem to have, then it's not impossible that Abramson is expected to act more kindly and to be more accessible than the case would be for a male boss.  That expectation, if we hold it, will be a subconscious one and doesn't preclude the aware assessment of her as "impossible."  Even if she wouldn't be regarded as impossible with a first name like Dylan.

This is what makes it  difficult to judge arguments about individual female and male bosses.  Of course there are terrible  bosses of both genders, but it's also likely that female bosses are held to higher and contradictory standards:  Be kind!  Be motherly!  But if you act that way you are indecisive, dithering, not strong enough.  

And we may weigh the requirements of kindness and accessibility more when the boss is female, given that on some level we believe those are "natural" for women to possess.

In any case, several studies have demonstrated that women leaders are held to contradictory standards.  Ultimately this is because the pattern for a leader has to do with characteristics we associate with men, not with women.

Those contradictions are not so present when we assess male leaders.  A man can show kindness and that's a bonus because it is in some ways not what his pattern makes us demand.  It's just an extra nice aspect of an otherwise ambitious and firm boss.
------
For more on this, see Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Read More

Yardwork

I was cleaning the yard the other day, raking together the ghosts of last summer's plants, pulling out the ivy aiming at world domination and so on.  As usual, I ended up sitting on my heels in the dead flower beds, with my hands muddy and full of thorns. 

I heard a rustling sound, turned my head, expecting a neighbor, and looked up into the face of a wild tom turkey.  Polite good days were exchanged.

Read More

The Reinhart-Rogoff Paper And Steven Colbert

If you are one of those people who think economics is about the most boring thing since spreadsheets, watch last night's Colbert show from 3:23 to 15:16.  That segment is all about how a UMass economics graduate student, Thomas Herndon, tried to replicate a very influential paper by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff.  That paper has been used as one of the launching pads for the current austerity policies.

Herndon was assigned the task of replicating the Reinhart-Rogoff paper in his econometrics class.  He tried and could not reproduce the original results.  Some background:

From the beginning there have been complaints that Reinhart and Rogoff weren't releasing the data for their results (e.g. Dean Baker). I knew of several people trying to replicate the results who were bumping into walls left and right - it couldn't be done. In a new paper, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff," Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst successfully replicate the results. After trying to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results and failing, they reached out to Reinhart and Rogoff and they were willing to share their data spreadhseet. This allowed Herndon et al. to see how how Reinhart and Rogoff's data was constructed.
They find that three main issues stand out. First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth. Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries. Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries. All three bias in favor of their result, and without them you don't get their controversial result.

The Reinhart-Rogoff paper wasn't peer reviewed because it appeared in the Papers and Proceedings section of the American Economic Review (AER).  Ordinary papers in the AER are peer reviewed but not the Papers and Proceedings ones.

But a peer review would not have caught those spreadsheet mistakes, given that the "peers" rarely (never?) review studies by replicating all the calculations.  The reasons for that are many:  In many cases such replication would be a giant amount of work,  peer reviews are unpaid, and, until quite recently, the original data was rarely made available by the researchers.

What are needed are more replications of studies, and not only in economics but in all sciences and social sciences.  The snag is that replication is time-consuming and academics have few incentives to spend time on repeating already existing findings, given that neither promotions nor tenure are likely to drop into the laps of replicators (unless they happen to disprove famous findings). 

But at a minimum, data used in such studies should be made available on the Internet.

This is not because I  think that researchers  do sloppy work or carefully stitch bias into their calculations and observations and so on, although that, too, probably happens.  It's because the incentives we provide for research will be improved if it is understood that any particular study can be subjected to scrutiny and replication.

While I'm writing about this topic, I also want to make a plea for assigning more value to studies which do not find anything startlingly different or new.  Indeed, finding that, say, a new treatment in medicine is no better than the old treatment is valuable information.  Similarly, finding that one's pet theory is rejected is important to publish, however painful that might be.  The file drawer effect is bad for real scientific advances.

Read More

Meet James Taranto

James Taranto has uttered something nasty again*:

TARANTO: One fascinating thing about this is this piece was published no later than 9:03 PM on Wednesday evening, because that's when it first appears on the New York Times' Twitter feed. The last Senate vote on amendments to the gun bill was a bit after 6 [PM]. Giffords appeared at the White House at 5:35 [PM] when we saw that enraged rant by the president. The Manchin-Toomey [background check] provision was the first vote. That was at 4:04 PM. So if you read this piece it's presented as a cry from the heart, as Giffords' personal reaction as somebody who's been wounded by gun violence to the betrayal of these Senators. So we are supposed to believe that somehow in less than five hours a woman who has severe impairments of her motor and speech functions was able to produce 900 publishable words and put in an appearance in the White House in the course of it. So I think that's a little bit odd.

Taranto is pretty good at nastiness.  I keep coming across his writings on us wimminfolk, on minorities and on various other groups he detests.  He is a believer in evolutionary psychology views of women as gold-diggers who are not really interested in having mutually enjoyable sex, only in marrying upwards and such.

But that's not especially nasty, just the usual crud.  This, however, IS nasty:

On July 25, 2012, Taranto sparked outrage online by posting the following comment to his Twitter account, in reference to the victims and survivors of the July 2012 Aurora, Colorado mass shooting: "I hope the girls whose boyfriends died to save them were worthy of the sacrifice".[18][19]

Taranto then tries to explain that tweet:

We intended this to be thought-provoking, but to judge by the response, very few people received it that way. The vast majority found it offensive and insulting. This column has often argued that a failure of public communication is the fault of the public communicator, and that's certainly true in this case. What follows is an attempt to answer for this failure with a circumspect accounting of our thoughts.

What makes the stories of Jansen Young, Samantha Yowler and Amanda Lindgren especially poignant is that their boyfriends' dying acts simultaneously dealt them an unfathomable loss and gave them an invaluable gift—a gift of life. Their loss is all the more profound because the gift was one of love as well. In instinctively making the ultimate sacrifice, each of these men proved the depth of his devotion. They passed a test to which most men, thankfully, are never put—and then they were gone.

These three women owe their lives to their men. That debt can never be repaid in kind, because life is for the living and cannot be returned to the dead. The closest they can come to redeeming it is to use the gift of their survival well – to live good, full, happy lives.

People live on after death in the memories of those who loved them. Sometimes when this columnist does something we consider worthwhile, our thoughts turn to our father, who died four years ago: "Dad would be proud." That is our hope for Young, Yowler and Lindgren: that in the years to come, each of them will have many opportunities to reflect that Jon or Matt or Alex would be proud of her.

But that doesn't work, because he used the past tense of the verb "to be."  The obvious reading of his tweet is an MRA one:

Men sacrifice themselves for women All The Time, then a mention of the Titanic and not a mention of the fact that the Titanic was a very unusual shipwreck in that sense.  Therefore, women, as a group,  should be grateful to men, as a group, and probably should graciously subjugate themselves as a way to show that  gratefulness.

Or this is what I've read on many, many MRA sites, and Taranto's tweet fits right into that ideology.

The problem with his tweet is not the incredible acts of self-sacrifice of those young men.  That is astonishing and worth respecting.  The problem with Taranto's tweet is that the girlfriends (who probably had no say in what took place) should now be judged as to whether they were worthy of such a final sacrifice.  Apply that same thinking to any other disaster where someone saves a life at the cost of his or her own.  Do we then read anyone writing to ask whether those who were saved are worthy of the sacrifice?

We do not.  And that's what is so nasty about Taranto's view.  It's sexist at the least, perhaps even misogynist.  On the other hand, his tweet says nothing about the shooter in that massacre or the shooter's gender.  Just like the MRA sites never mention whom it is that the brave men are defending women against.  Because it is very very rarely against other women.

I have no interest in framing such questions as part of the battle of the sexes or any other ridiculous term people use for sexual politics.  But that's how Taranto's tweet reads to me, and the only way to explain why it is nasty is to clarify the background.

Then to this most recent Taranto nastiness:

His insinuation that Gabrielle Gifford couldn't have written her op-ed herself,  in the time window she had, given her brain damage.  Now, I suspect that most politicians don't actually write the op-eds that bear their names all on their own.  Never mind.  Let's suppose that they do.

Media Matters does mention that she could have written her op-ed earlier.  But the op-ed itself mentions that she has trouble speaking, not that she has trouble thinking:

Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious.

She says nothing about how difficult or easy writing is for her.  It is Taranto who decides that because she has difficulty speaking she must not be able to write, either.  And therefore, what?

That she doesn't hold the opinions stated in the piece?  That she is a marionette operated by someone else?  What is it, exactly, that Taranto intends to say with that quote which began this post?
----
*Via Eschaton.

Read More

Gender Similarity Studies

This is a pretty sparse field, given the human tendency to look for and to magnify any gender differences and the similar tendency to ignore gender similarity as a similarity.  When the two sexes are the same, the category "gender" drops out of the analysis altogether.

Usually.  But I spotted two studies which are about gender similarity.  I haven't vetted either one of them, but the point is to popularize some studies from the other side of the fence, so to speak, the types which tend not to get popularized much.

First,  one study has analyzed whether sex differences are something that can be analyzed as taxonic:

But what of all those published studies, many of which claim to find differences between the sexes? In our research, published recently in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we shed an empirical light on this question by using a method called taxometric analysis.
This method asks whether data from two groups are likely to be taxonic — a classification that distinguishes one group from another in a nonarbitrary, fundamental manner, called a “taxon” — or whether they are more likely to be dimensional, with individuals’ scores dispersed along a single continuum.
The existence of a taxon implies a fundamental distinction, akin to the difference between species. As the clinical psychologist Paul Meehl famously put it, “There are gophers, there are chipmunks, but there are no gophmunks.”
A dimensional model, in contrast, indicates that men and women come from the same general pool, differing relatively, trait by trait, much as any two individuals from the same group might differ.
We applied such techniques to the data from 13 studies, conducted earlier by other researchers. In each, significant differences had been found. We then looked more closely at these differences to ask whether they were more likely to be of degree (a dimension) or kind (a taxon).
The studies looked at diverse attributes, including sexual attitudes and behavior, desired mate characteristics, interest in and ease of learning science, and intimacy, empathy, social support and caregiving in relationships.
Across analyses spanning 122 attributes from more than 13,000 individuals, one conclusion stood out: instead of dividing into two groups, men and women overlapped considerably on attributes like the frequency of science-related activities, interest in casual sex, or the allure of a potential mate’s virginity.
Even stereotypical traits, like assertiveness or valuing close friendships, fell along a continuum. In other words, we found little or no evidence of categorical distinctions based on sex.

The authors point out that some other characteristics indeed seemed to be taxonic in their study: physical size, athletic ability and sex-stereotyped hobbies like playing video games and scrapbooking. 

Though I think the reasons for the sex-stereotyped hobbies themselves may not be taxonic but based on complex societal influences and individual interests and the dance between the two of them.  For example, video games have been coded as male and they also mostly have topics which are traditionally male-linked.  Likewise, scrapbooking has been coded as female and is largely about children.  Yet it would be easy enough to think of topics for scrap books which would appeal to men or boys and it would also be easy to create video games that would appeal to women and men.  In short, it's not that there is something inherently sex-linked about the acts of  playing video games or scrapbooking.

In any case, this study seems to me to repeat something that might be obvious:  Individuals differ in all sorts of ways and very few schema allow us to put all women into one class and all men into another class.  But of course those who believe that men and women are inherently and eternally two different types of creatures altogether will never be persuaded by anything of this sort.

Another study of interest in this context has to do with whether fathers can tell when it is their child who is crying, rather than some other child.  Past studies have suggested that mothers are better at this than fathers.  This study finds no difference.  Here is the abstract:

Previous investigations of parents’ abilities to recognize the cries of their own babies have identified substantial and significant sex differences, with mothers showing greater correct recognition rates than fathers. Such sex differences in parenting abilities are common in non-human mammals and usually attributed to differential evolutionary pressures on male and female parental investment. However, in humans the traditional concept of ‘maternal instinct’ has received little empirical support and is incongruous given our evolutionary past as cooperative breeders. Here we use a controlled experimental design to show that both fathers and mothers can reliably and equally recognize their own baby from their cries, and that the only crucial factor affecting this ability is the amount of time spent by the parent with their own baby. These results highlight the importance of exposure and learning in the development of this ability, which may rely on shared auditory and cognitive abilities rather than sex-specific innate predispositions.

The whole question of how human mothers differ from other animal mothers is fascinating.  I haven't read enough in the field to say much, yet, but it seems that some applications to human child-rearing from the rest of the animal kingdom are based on theories which might not apply to primate mothers in the first place. 

For example, the early theories of the importance of bonding seem to have come from species where bonding (almost an imprinting, along the Konrad Lorenz lines)  is crucial for proper mothering.  But those species are not primates, and primate studies suggest that cultural learning is an important part of learning how to mother in chimpanzees, for example. 

As I mentioned above, I haven't looked at this study in detail.  But what it seems to suggest is that those parents who spend time with their children get good at recognizing that child's cry, whether they are mothers or fathers.  If earlier studies did not take into account the time spent with the child, their results could have followed from the fact that most infant care is done by mothers, not from some difference in parenting instincts between mothers and fathers.

Read More

A Criminal Vs. An Enemy Combatant. Words Have Consequences.

I have been following the Boston Marathon bombings and its aftermath.  I'm glad that at least one of the alleged bombers was captured alive, for the sake of more information and clarity and, of course, for the sake of carrying out the tasks of a proper system of justice.  Those tasks are important for civilization to exist.

My political awakening coincided with two events:  The election of the second Georgie Porgie and the political events following 911.  The latter, in particular, was a rough awakening:  Plans to attack Iraq, a country which had nothing to do with the 911 massacres, pushed everything else into a hasty foreplay before the intended war could be started.

But there was so much else wrong with those "everything else" events, including invading Afghanistan without an exit plan, not mentioning the country which in fact produced (and produces) the terrorists and the hasty creation of an enemy for the wars this country is still waging.

This enemy is a nebulous one, hiding under different names and inside different groups, not defined by much anything than one religion, and sometimes not even that.  We were told to create an image of the enemy in childish political terms (they want our toys, our freedoms/it is our sexual license that makes them do it) which omits US foreign policy from all consideration,  and we were told to look elsewhere when actual information could have clarified that frightening enemy lurking in the shades, could have made it less frightening, more objective and thus more possible to actually conquer.

I get the great advantages the Bush administration reaped from placing the country on a permanent war status.  For one thing, he probably got re-selected because of that, and he also got free hands to do almost anything he wished to do.

But from the very beginning of this  I was adamantly opposed to that framing.  The correct approach seemed to me then to treat the criminals as criminals.

This is still true, and the reasons are many.  First, the real terrorists regard themselves as soldiers in a holy war. By giving them that label voluntarily, they get greater recruiting potential, greater fame, greater martyrdom.  They were taken seriously, in the sense of an honorable opponent, someone we could declare a war against.  But in reality that group IS undefined, nebulous, and ultimately quite small.  What the US administration chose to do in 2001 elevated it, gave it mythical importance and a greater justification for existing.

Being declared a criminal has less glory attached to it than being declared an enemy combatant.  Thus, by choosing the latter (as would want to do) we are giving the terrorists exactly what they want.

Second,  the position of permanent and eternal war gives the US government powers to breach civil rights and human rights, a blank license to do things we would never accept done in ordinary crime prevention and crime-solving.  But because the danger is now existential, almost anything, from water boarding to sending suspects to torture in other countries, can at least be debated.  Once again, this gives the terrorists pretty much what they want if they happened to be motivated by the belief that Americans have too much freedom.

Third,  that treatment creates the foundation for illogical reptile-brain fears to fog out logical thinking.  If this danger is existential, it matters much more than the types of catastrophies (the Texas plant explosions) which cost us many more lives.  If this danger is existential, almost any amount of money can be spent on averting it, whereas the causes which cost many more lives are regarded as "spending we cannot afford."  This danger can be used to prop up utterly preposterous divisions of the federal budget pie and it can be used to fatten up parts of the bureaucracy which really do not need any more fattening.

Fourth, and this is a reason I only started thinking about recently, after reading articles about what might follow these events among American Muslims, Sikhs, or almost anyone who might look like whatever the imagination decides a frightening terrorist looks like:  Harassment, perhaps even violence aimed at those who might look like that nebulous enemy in the hind-brain of some frightened television-overloaded asshat.

Some of that bigotry and fear is unrelated to the use of war terms, but some is strengthened by that.  If the terrorists were regarded as mere criminals, they would be a clearly defined group.  Once they are defined as enemy combatants, even when they are American citizens, the idea of a fifth column is supported, grows horrible tentacles and infects the minds of individuals who might not otherwise have reacted that way:  If this is a real enemy, how can we tell who belongs to it?  They might be everywhere!  Help!

And because of that nebulous aspect of the enemy, anything the known cases might share with groups in the society becomes focal, becomes the criterion used to differentiate between "us" and "them."

As I mentioned, this is not the only reason for racial or religious profiling, and it has never worked for the white Christian terrorists (because whites and Christians are too large groups in the US, perhaps, but also because they are the home-group of many of those who practice the profiling).

Neither does it work for the one aspect of terrorists which in some ways is the most informative:  They are overwhelmingly male.  That, too, may be because the category is too wide but also because being male is the default category in our thinking and in that sense uninformative.  For instance, if most terrorists were female we would have hundreds of books on that because being female is not the default category.

Had we gone down the road of defining these horrors as crimes and their perpetrators as nasty criminals I think we might have had less bigotry and anger aimed at vast groups of innocent Americans and citizens of other countries.  International cooperation might have been strengthened, too.

These are my thoughts after reading this:

At the same time, some Republican senators, including John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, argued that using the criminal-justice system was a mistake and that Mr. Tsarnaev should instead be held indefinitely by the military as an “enemy combatant,” under the laws of war, and questioned without any Miranda warning or legal representation, in order to gain intelligence.Still, there is not yet any public evidence suggesting that Mr. Tsarnaev was part of Al Qaeda or its associated forces — the specific enemy with which the United States is engaged in an armed conflict. And some legal specialists also doubted that the Constitution would permit holding a suspect like Mr. Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant.
“This is an American citizen being tried for a crime that occurred domestically, and there is simply no way to treat him like an enemy combatant — not even close,” said Alan M. Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and seasoned defense lawyer.

So.  At the time I write this we don't know what may have motivated the Tsarnaev brothers, in any case, but the flag of war has already been raised.   Even if the older brother had raised such a flag himself, taking that seriously would be a mistake.  It would give him (and any copycats) exactly the kind of martyrdom and glory they desire.  Being called a criminal is not glamorous.  It is also much closer to the truth.

Read More

The Shame Of Dressing in Women's Clothes

An interesting story from Maravan, Iran:

A group of Kurdish activist women from Marivan, along with a few citizens of the city, held a demonstration April 16 on the main streets of the city in protest of the authorities’ parading a man in Marivan after dressing him in the traditional women’s clothing of Kurdistan, a local source told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. The Special Guard Unit violently confronted the demonstrators.
According to the human rights activist, the women activists clad themselves in red Kurdish costumes to protest the red Kurdish clothes the man, T. Daabaashi, was forced to wear for what the authorities called punishment of “hoodlums.” The women carried placards and called the act of parading the man an insult to women and to Kurdish people, an act they strongly condemned. After the initial gathering and the flow of the demonstrators from Moosak Square towards the Shabrang intersection, Special Guard forces surrounded the protesters and attacked them in the 12 Sawareh Square of Marivan, injuring a number of the participants with pepper gas and batons. According to an eyewitness, the severe attack resulted in a broken leg for one of the female protesters and severe head injuries for several others.
... 

The human rights activist added that the man who had been dressed in female Kurdish clothing was accused of quarreling and wielding a knife, and by the orders of the Mariwan prosecutor, was forced to wear a headscarf, Kurdish pants, and red women’s clothes as security forces paraded him on the main streets of Marivan on April 15. The widespread protest in the city caused several Kurdish Members of Parliament to write a letter and demand admonishment of the Interior and Justice Ministers.

The basis of the sentence is the assumption that men are "lowered" or shamed by being forced to dress as women.  By the way, this does not work in reverse.  Try a thought experiment.  Thus, this is about the fact that being a woman is regarded as lower than being a man and men can be punished by making them temporarily dress as women.

Here is the Facebook response from many Kurdish men who want to support women:

One participant writes:

To show my solidarity and support to the “womanhood” and their suffers and torments during the history mostly have done by “men” [sic]. as we have faced recently a stupid judge”s order to punish a person by putting on him the feminine customs, so it is one of the times that we should gather around each other and condemn this stupidity, brutality and inhumanity against the womanhood; the half of society as well as at least half of the human being on the earth. I am supporting womanhood by the at least I can do for them.

What makes this interesting is that the power of social shaming does depend on others implicitly believing in something being shameful.  If enough people refuse to go along with that, the connection between the punishment and the shame is reduced.

In one of those bouts of serendipity I noticed something similar working in quite a different story, this one about slut shaming:

It all started when the good folks at George Washington High School decided to address this rampant problem of teen sluttery by having a guest speaker come in to yell at their students about their whorish ways. No for reals the speaker, Pam Stenzel… decided that the best way to get her message across to these kids requires a healthy dose of apoplectic misogyny with a sprinkling of utter bullshit:
At GW’s assembly, Stenzel allegedly told students that “if you take birth control, your mother probably hates you” and “I could look at any one of you in the eyes right now and tell if you’re going to be promiscuous.” She also asserted that condoms aren’t safe, and every instance of sexual contact will lead to a sexually transmitted infection…

Katelyn Campbell, a senior at the school and the student body vice president, took the initiative on her own to make sure that future classes aren’t subjected to that level of derp:
Campbell refused to attend the assembly, which was funded by a conservative religious organization called “Believe in West Virginia” and advertised with fliers that proclaimed “God’s plan for sexual purity.” Instead, she filed a complaint with the ACLU and began to speak out about her objections to this type of school-sponsored event. Campbell called Stenzel’s presentation “slut shaming” and said that it made many students uncomfortable.

Shaming is a weapon much used in female socialization.  Perhaps more than in socialization in general.

Read More

Dog-Sitting...

That's the reason for no deep, meaningful or boring posts today.  I love this arrangement.  It might be a bit like being the grandparent and not the parent:  I can pamper the dog and have fun but nobody expects me to train her out of any of her bad habits in one weekend!

But the dog needs to be exercised and then I have to follow her around the house because one of her not-so-good habits is eating everything that fits in her mouth, whether it's food or not, and the Snakepit Inc. is not exactly the sort of place where one can eat off the floors...

Read More

What Should Be Written

Articles that should be written and researched:

1.  What actually happened to the culprits in the aftermath of the financial and housing markets collapses.  Which culprits were punished and how?  How many scapegoats were sacrificed?  Is the power now removed from those who caused the collapses?  What corrective mechanisms have been put in place to prevent similar collapses in the near future?  Who rules the stock markets?

Writing this should begin with the promises made, by the way.  I believe that the major culprits got no punishment and are still holding the reins.

2.  An easier but similar article:  What was the reaction to the need for gun control after the Newtown massacre?  And where are we now, in terms of that reaction?  Is anything going to change, except for more armed people milling around in elementary schools?  How does real power operate in this area?

There are researchers and writers who have done work on these topics, but I yearn for a very wide-angle take of the processes, the way power actually sticks exactly where it was originally, while the powers that be wait for the public memory to evaporate.

Read More

Today's Research Snack

Here's a fun study about how men find it more difficult to judge women's emotions than men's emotions and how different parts of their brains light up in the two cases.  The study has photographs of eyes only, twenty-two men looking at them and a humongous amount of statistical manipulation to produce the results.  It is summarized here.

I'm not saying that the results are wrong.  I can't tell, actually, given that the raw data isn't there, and I'm too tired to try to sleuth through the statistics.  But with 22 cases it should have been possible to post the success rates of each individual man.  This is important, because a few outliers could seriously affect the findings.

The discussion of the results is fascinating, too.  The authors mostly address the possibility that these men are better at getting emotions expressed by men's eyes right, because, roughly, they learn them by looking at the mirror in the morning.  Or, rather, we are better at deciphering people most like ourselves.

But then at the very end of the report they give a nod to evolutionary psychology:

The finding that men are superior in recognizing emotions/mental states of other men, as compared to women, might be surprising. From an evolutionary point of view, accurate interpretations of other men’s rather than women’s thoughts and intentions, especially threatening cues (also related to amygdala responsiveness [40]), may have been a factor contributing to survival in ancient times. As men were more involved in hunting and territory fights, it would have been important for them to be able to predict and foresee the intentions and actions of their male rivals.

Perhaps.  But note that usually evolutionary psychology is all about the necessity to pass one's genes on, and the prelude to that requires to find someone of the opposite sex to mate with.  Suddenly understanding that opposite sex (women) matters not a whit but male aggression does.

I guess I have trouble with articles which are all about brain imaging and technical language and suddenly the discussion adds a few hypotheses that nobody can ever confirm, based on the assumption that men were more involved in hunting and territory fights and that those fights were so crucial for survival that they created an adaptation which made men better at reading emotions in other men than in women.  What about all that need to find women to mate with?

There are alternative explanations, including the theory that one is best at interpreting emotions in people who are most similar to oneself, but also the fact that even in today's society it is more important to understand the emotional cues given by more powerful people.  Because they matter more.

Read More

Pope Francis And the Uppity Nuns of America

Well, we learn that in some ways the New Pope Is The Old Pope:

In a statement issued Monday, the Vatican said Francis had “reaffirmed” the doctrinal evaluation and criticism of U.S. nuns carried out last year by the Vatican under his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. The assessment accused the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization that represents most U.S. female Catholic orders, of promoting “radical feminism” and of ignoring the Vatican’s hard line on same-sex marriage and abortion.


What stinks about all that is naturally the fact that the church=boyz in all this, and celibate boyz at that.  Thus, the control and command of the nuns with their "radical feminism" is in the hands of guys who absolutely do not want any kind of gender equality inside the church.

Read More

The Ghouls

That would be a lot of the US media covering the Boston Marathon bombings.  Because of 911, I was aware of certain things to look for, even without intending to look for them, and I spotted them very very fast.  For example, a local television station showing injured people being pushed in wheelchairs by emergency personnel seemed to apologize for the fact that these were the people being helped later because they were less hurt.  So we got told there was a lot of blood and missing limbs earlier.

We are invited to participate in a disaster vicariously.  For that to work, the coverage must focus on suffering, the more gruesome the better, and repetition of the worst possible shots.  As I mentioned in earlier comments, one television station told the viewers: "And now you can watch the bombings one more time."

Even the people on the site only watched the bombings once.

All this is very bad, for four reasons:  First, acting ghoulish serves the goals of any terrorists.  They want to terrorize us, the media participates in producing maximum fear in its audiences.

Second, as I have written elsewhere, watching the disaster unfolding, over and over again, is very harmful.  It may give the viewer vicarious PTSD, and that benefits nobody, but may cost money one day to treat and may also warp our thinking about the events.  Our bodies think we were there, our bodies store the memories, for them to crop up later at certain cues.

Third, if it doesn't cause PTSD in someone, it may cause a confusion between reality and movies, hardening the viewer, making the events seem altogether unreal and contrived.  From that it's not a big step to the assumption that all disasters are unreal, conspiracies created by this government or some other nefarious group, rather than terrorists of whatever stripe.

Fourth, there is a flavor of pain pron in much of the coverage:  Looking for the most heart-breaking case, repeating it over and over again, shifting from that to the next most heart-breaking case and so on.

I get that we are all drawn to be ghouls, that our natural reactions are to watch, mesmerized and shocked.  I get that, because it would be a somewhat useful reaction if we were on the site and unable to help, because some learning could come from all that.  But it's not helpful when the events unfold elsewhere, when we are not there, and when our watching doesn't help anyone but may harm us.

Read More

On the Boston Marathon Bombs

My thoughts are with those who suffer, both in Boston and in Iraq.  It is far too early to conclude anything about the Boston bombings, except that the events qualify as terrorism.

So let's not get terrorized.  Note the kindness of strangers, in the aftermath, ranging from the runners who continued to run after the end of the race, straight to the hospital to donate blood to those who have opened their houses and apartments as safe havens to other strangers.  And note the excellent work of the first responders.

Read More

Risotto

Love it.  Our affair began fairly recently but the food sex has never been better.  It's worth all that foreplay, standing by the stove with the boiling broth and the wooden spatula, stirring, stirring, stirring...

The rice needs to be of the right type, the type which remains firm but moist, which coagulates and slowly, slowly, agonizingly slowly falls apart at the very moment when the taste buds explode in orgasmic enjoyment.

Anything can be gently massaged into a risotto: peas, mushrooms, garlic, herbs.  The flavors intermingle but remain subtle, the waiting for it to be ready is a delicious agony.  Risotto day!

And if you ever tire of the wholesome food sex of risotto, buy a bottle of truffle oil*.  Gently dribble some of it on your heaped portion right before eating and prepare for a whole new world of taste.

----
*It's pricy per bottle but not expensive per meal, especially if compared to the price of actual truffles.

Read More

The She's-A-Slut Culture

Contents:  Sexual Violence, Suicide, Ostracism

Rehtaeh Parsons in Canada and Audrie Potts in the United States were teenage girls.  Both alleged that they were gang-raped by teenage boys while being  unconscious from alcohol.   Both also seem to have been the victims of social media and real world ostracism after the events took place.  And both took their own lives, Audrie last September and Rehtaeh this April.

In Parsons' case the initial police investigation about the alleged gang-rape  ended in no charges though the case has now been reopened, apparently because of new information.  The rumors are that a witness or one of the alleged rapists has come forward because of Rehtaeh's suicide.  In Potts' case the police has made recent arrests.

That is all a very neutral summary of the events which otherwise bring Steubenville to mind.  The shared aspects of these three cases (and many more)  are a) the alleged unconsciousness or near-unconsciousness of the girls, b) the gang aspect of the alleged rapes, and c) the destruction of the girls' reputations via social media and real world ostracism, including the spread of photos about the alleged rapes or the otherwise disgusting treatment of an alleged rape victim.  At least two of the cases also suggest a fairly lethargic involvement by the police and all three cases demonstrate that the schools failed in their duties.

Reading about all these cases is painful and difficult.  Writing those cut-and-dry statements is extremely insufficient.   But it is a necessary prelude for what I want to talk about:  The second Act in the play titled "How To Ruin A Young Girl's Life."

The First Act of the play is a sexual act, or an act which some parts of the society labels as mutually voluntary sex, even if it really is a gang-rape where one "participant" is unconscious and has given no consent.  More generally, almost any kind of sexual behavior by the young woman or girl may suffice the get the play going.

The Second Act is what articles about these cases call bullying.  But it's something more vicious than that term can convey.  It is ostracism combined with the destruction of someone's external reputation.  Mere ostracism at least leaves the target alone.  What the treatment of these teenagers suggests is more abhorrent:  The target is isolated, left almost friendless but still continuously harassed, ridiculed, gossiped about. 

Rehteah Parsons received text messages from strangers asking her for sex months after the alleged gang-rape.  The Steubenville rape victim was described as a whore and a slut in many tweets I read a month after the rape, and those who described her that way were her age and both male and female.  The Facebook messages I also scrutinized at that time described her as a slut and the boys as innocent victims of the naturally-must-hump-a-slut instinct.

Did the Steubenville victim not get supportive messages in the social media then?  Perhaps, but despite my attempts I couldn't unearth any.  This suggests (only suggests, as support could have been offered in personal channels only) that the view of sexually active women as sluts and whores is widespread among the young, that many teenagers think being unconscious or extremely drunk is not a valid excuse for becoming the object of sexual treatment by others and that men cannot help themselves in sexual matters, cannot abstain from having sex with inanimate human beings.  In short, the responsibility for gate-keeping sex is clearly seen as belonging to women.

What in olden days used to be called victim-blaming (why did she go to that party?  why did she drink so much?  how come was she dressed like that?) is not seen as victim-blaming but as The Way Things Are.  Boys are supposed to try to get sex, at almost any cost, good girls are supposed to cross their legs and somehow have that hold, whereas bad girls are stamped with the slut label and are then free game forevermore.

I was shocked to find all that so very much alive in the social media.  I naively thought that the past discussions about victim-blaming were now knitted into the wider society.  But that does not seem to be the case.  There are still good women (not for public sexual consumption) and bad women (for public sexual consumption).

What makes all this so horrible is that we are discussing minors in most of the better-known cases.  Children, really.  Teenagers whose lives revolve around their peer groups and for whom the sentence of that peer group can well mean death.  At the same time, those teenage boys got their understanding of the rules of the sex game from somewhere.  Who taught them that unconscious girls can be used that way?  Was it their parents?  The general culture?  Pornography?  I think the answer matters tremendously.

But it's not just the boys we need to reach.  The girls with those Twitter and Facebook accounts too often shared a similar understanding:  In some odd way boys and men are entitled to try for sex, by hook or crook, and if they succeed then the girl or a woman is a slut or a whore but he got lucky.

We need to do something about those values, and the need is urgent.

In the final and Third Act of the play the wider consequences of all this play out.   What they are depends on the individuals involved, on whether the woman or girl ever tells anyone about what happened, on her mental and emotional strength, on the severity of the hatred she must bear from her culture, on the support she receives and on the whole larger culture.  If the police is informed about the case as an alleged rape,  the values the police officers hold enter the story, and finally the values of those who decide whether a case can go to court or not.

At all those stages we must be aware of those underlying values, of the submerged belief that the destruction of some lives (such as the  student athletes in the Steubenville case) really counts for more than the destruction of other lives (such as that of the Steubenville victim) and of the deep, deep roots of the belief that women really are responsible for sex that happened, except if she lost an arm or her life while fighting against it.

The least helpful of all reactions I have read is the recommendation that girls not be allowed to go to parties, that alcohol should be kept away from teenagers, that parents are to blame for not supervising their children (usually their daughters) better.  This is not because it wouldn't be good to monitor teenagers but because all those assumptions are the same as saying that young men really all are rapists, that nothing can be done about that except to make sure that it's not your daughter who gets raped by them.  Besides, the advice usually boils down to limiting girls' freedoms as a solution to something that really isn't their fault.

All that is preposterous.  It is also highly insulting to all the young men who would never try to have sex with an unconscious woman or man, while doing nothing to the suggestion that perhaps that IS how young men are expected to act.

Read More

The Capitalists' Flexibility Act of 2013

This is a truly rotten proposal:

This week House Republicans will introduce the misleadingly titled “Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013.” Touted by Republicans as a new comp time initiative that will give hourly-paid workers the flexibility to meet family responsibilities, it is neither new nor about giving these workers much needed time off to care for their families. The bill rehashes legislation Republicans passed in the House in 1997, some 16 years ago, and that they introduced again in most subsequent Congresses. Its major effect would be to hamstring workers – likely increasing overtime hours for those who don’t want them and cutting pay for those who do.

The proposed legislation undermines the 40-hour work week that workers have long relied on to give them time to spend with their kids. The flexibility in this comp time bill would have employees working unpaid overtime hours beyond the 40-hour workweek and accruing as many as 160 hours of compensatory time. A low-paid worker making $10 an hour who accrued that much comp time in lieu of overtime pay would effectively give his or her employer an interest-free loan of $1,600 – equal to a month’s pay. That’s a lot to ask of a worker making about $20,000 a year. Indeed, any worker who accrues 160 hours of comp time will in effect have loaned his or her employer a month’s pay. This same arithmetic provides employers with a powerful incentive to increase workers’ overtime hours. Instead of having to pay time-and-a-half wages when an hourly-paid employee works longer than the standard 40-hour work week, the employer incurs no financial cost at the time the extra hours are worked.

Let's smell the rot.  Note that what the bill actually does is give more flexibility and financial savings to the firms, not to the workers!  Imagine that, from the Republican Party.  The whole thing is like those environmental pollution initiatives called "Clean Skies" which aim to turn the skies permanently gray and poisonous.

And yes, this is a direct attempt to take away the 40-hour work week.  Even if agreeing to do overtime is voluntary under this bill, the current reality is that an employee graciously refusing such a wonderful opportunity would soon be looking for a new job.

Then the real jab-in-the-back of that wonderful flexibility:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) is right when he says that working parents have a hard time being home when their kids really need them.  Parents need the flexibility to take a child who suddenly develops a high fever to the doctor or to attend a meeting with their child’s teacher to develop his or her educational plan for the coming school year. The comp time bill House Republicans will introduce this Thursday does not address these needs at all. Employees cannot just take comp time when they need it. Rather, the bill lets an employer who receives a request for comp time decide when the employee gets to take it. The employer can even refuse the request and defer it to a later time if, in the employer’s view, letting the employee take comp time will “unduly disrupt the operations of the employer.”

Bolds are mine, and so is the anger.

Read More

Never Thin Enough? Thoughts About What We Can Sell in the Labor Market.

Content Warning:  Body Images and Anorexia


Joan Smith in the UK Independent reviews The Vogue Factor, a book about the eating requirements in the modeling industry.  Or,  rather, its  not-eating requirements.

I haven't read the book but the picture attached to Smith's article stuck in my mind.  Here it is:

Who knows how representative the model in the picture is.  I'd guess she is more malnourished than most models.  What I cannot get off my mind is the possibility that her liver is visible in that picture.  I think it is, and anyone that thin is in dire danger.

Smith writes:

Imagine a factory where the employees are regularly being starved.

Some are so desperate with hunger that they pick up tissues from the floor and stuff them into their mouths, while a few become so weak that they have to be admitted to hospital and put on a drip. Any industry which treated workers so badly would be targeted by undercover reporters. Photographs of emaciated workers would cause an outcry, questions would be asked in parliament and the factory would be closed down.

But that doesn't happen in the fashion industry.  Not really, despite all the PR campaigns in that direction, and we all know why:  The extreme thinness is an occupational requirement.

This topic is an octopus with a thousand (thin) legs, all of which are worth following.  I have written about the deep reasons for female body modifications before and certainly will write about them again.  The way our bodies are never good enough, never pretty enough, never satisfactory, the way we ARE our bodies, in far too many aspects of our lives and the way we end up having at most a ceasefire with them.  The "we" being a literary construct here.

But this time I want to write about something different:  The question how to react when jobs require the workers to engage in quite unhealthy activities but when the jobs are not in themselves coercive, forced labor or extremely poorly paid.  Do we have empathy for the fashion models who appear to go along with the risky bargains which are expected of them?  Do we have empathy for those professional athletes who take dangerous substances in order to grow muscle mass far above and beyond the bearing capacity of their joints and muscles?  And how should we react to the well-paid executive officer who is expected to spend sixteen hours working every day of his or her year?

In some ways all this is about what kinds of contracts people can make with each other.  If a firm wants to pay a worker well for that worker's loss of health, is such a job contract acceptable to us?  Is there a difference between the wealthy over-working executive and a teenager starting a modeling career?  What about the indication that professional football players, for example, tend to die younger than otherwise similar men?  What can we sell in the labor markets?

The required thinness of fashion models may have more serious consequences because these women are "models" of how desirable women should look.  In that sense the health dangers their job involves affect not only themselves but countless numbers of young girls.  Still, to some extent similar dangers exist for young boys and girls who wish to emulate professional athletes.

Read More